Archive for the 'Islam' Tag Under 'Letters To The Editor' Category

About 60 Muslims and others held a vigil at The District in in response to the killings of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other personnel in Libya this week. "Violence is escalating. Religious extremism is escalating as well. That not good for the U.S. That's not good for me. That's not good for anyone else," said Vicki Tamoush, a Tustin resident and founder of Interfaith Witnesses, a group that stands in silent support of those who are being harassed because of their faith. (LEONARD ORTIZ, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER)

SANTA ANA, Jay Peterson: To answer the question, “Why the Muslim Rage?” [Focus, Sept. 15], one must go back to the early days of Islam, when the prophet began to spread the new faith by military conquest.

Many rioters and protesters throughout the Islamic world would likely know that there were once rich and powerful Islamic empires that made their infidel neighbors tremble with fear: the Caliphate, the original Islamic empire; Islamic Persia; the Ottoman Empire; the Golden Horde; the Mughal Empire.

Today, those empires and their glory days are relics of the past. While the power of Islamic lands declined, that Europe and America grew. Muslim rage is likely from those who view themselves and Islam as having been denied a “rightful” position of world supremacy. They are enraged by perceived insults from those whom they view as their inferiors, worthy only of being their subjects or their slaves.

From the viewpoint of many Muslims, it must seem that Allah smiles upon infidels rather than upon true believers. Why? To extremist fundamentalists, the answer is that this is their punishment for not making war on nonbelievers. If Islam's glory days came from attacking and conquering infidels, then the way to begin a new “golden age” for Muslims is to again make war upon the world and spread the faith by force, thereby regaining the favor of Allah.

TUSTIN, John F. Rossmann, former president of the Orange Unified Education Association: False prophets gain their desired notoriety by telling the faithful what they want to hear, and the misinformation in the Sept. 6 Watchdog, “To some, pension cuts advisable and legal,” is an example of this. The protection of pension rights for active and retired public employees is grounded in the United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 10, known as “The Contracts Clause.” It would take a national constitutional convention to change that.

It seems many conservative politicians would like to forget about our founding fathers' principle of “social contract” that extends far-beyond written contracts because the social contract can be implicit. Not even bankruptcy can free a public entity from The Contracts Clause, and any attempts to use bankruptcy to break contractual obligations will only lead to costly (to taxpayers) legal battles that they will ultimately lose, thanks to James Madison and our founding fathers.

In fact, it's questionable that even all the changes to private pension plans are constitutional, and starting a court fight might end up rolling back all the cuts to private pensions that corporations have imposed over the years. That would be great for the American worker. And the father of the Constitution would approve. So, bring it on.

LAGUNA NIGUEL, Manuel Fernandez: Columnist David W. Dickey says that the Social Security trust fund has no assets and that Social Security is broke and running annual deficits [“Inaction on Social Security our fault,” Orange Grove, May 11]. The 2012 OASDI Trustees Report says that the trust fund has assets invested in government securities “guaranteed as to principal and interest and backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.” The report shows the fund had an annual surplus of $69 billion and assets of $2.7 trillion. Expenditures were $725 billion and the total income was $805 billion.

Then Dickey says that assets consist of IOU's. The assets are held in guaranteed government securities. IOU's are converted to securities per law and are only used as a bookkeeping item.

Americans deserve the truth and a national debate not by the battling political parties, but by a college debating society as these are the important stakeholders in the debate on the future of Social Security.

What truly puzzles and concerns me is that this information has now been made public. We are at war with al-Qaida, declared or otherwise. That is the reality. Why did the Associated Press think it in the national interest to reveal this information? Who passed this on to AP? Now our adversary can regroup and possibly redesign its bomb, and it may become extremely difficult to infiltrate other enemy cells in the future.

Keeping things secret (as we did in World War II with ULTRA or in the Cold War, tapping the Soviet's undersea communication cables) helped keep us abreast of our adversary's intentions and, in the end, helped win both wars.

News organizations are trivializing this as a “sting operation,” thereby equating it to some minor-level drug or prostitution bust. This is a grave mistake, and one I hope will not come back to haunt us. [More letters on terrorism]

LAGUNA HILLS, Scott Ayers: Having a brother who lives in London, I follow British news and have seen how their struggles with the National Health Service may be harbingers of the consequences of Obamacare.

The United Kingdom is experiencing a critical shortage of general-practice doctors, and the increase in average patient load, up to 3,000 patients per general practitioner, is having a significant impact on the availability of health care. It seems that the low financial reward for being a GP is a reason for the shortage of doctors.

On a related subject, a problem with alcohol abuse in the UK is running up the bill for treatment of alcohol-related illness and disease, and the NHS can't afford it.

The proposed solution to the problem is to set a minimum price for alcoholic beverages “to discourage excessive drinking.” Pricing will be based upon the alcohol content of a given product, and a new government agency will be established to supervise, evaluate and ensure compliance with the mandate. With the annual billion-dollar increase in prices for alcoholic beverages, and with increased sales tax revenue (20 percent value-added tax on every sale), the logic is that fewer people can afford to abuse alcohol, and there will be more tax revenue to pay for drunkenness.

MISSION VIEJO, Burl Estes: The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928, arose from an extreme version of Islam that emerged out of the post-colonial rise of Arab nationalism. While many Muslims just want to get on with life and have no leanings toward religious extremism, let alone violence, far too many others have fed upon a sense of cultural dislocation and bought into the teachings of the extremists.

The Brotherhood's beliefs were strongly influenced by Islamic thinkers such as Sayyid Qutb and later fused with the puritanical Wahhabi doctrine that is the orthodoxy in Saudia Arabia which the Saudis have been promoting worldwide by building mosques and madras religious schools that teach the Koran as being the literal word of God, which includes the parts about either subjugating or killing infidels.

Qutb wrote that Muslims must answer to God alone and that human government was illegitimate. Government was, therefore, a proper target for jihad which would be waged by true believers seeking to destroy the kingdom of man to establish the kingdom of heaven on Earth. The defining characteristic of the doctrine is that the world must be conquered for Islam.

Both extremists and moderate Muslims recoil from the breakdown of Western values, which they see as widespread decadence in the forms of alcoholism, drug use, pornography, promiscuity and the breakdown of family life. Sayyed Qutb wrote after a visit to the United States in 1948, “Humanity is living in a large brothel.” And the Kardashian sisters, Paris Hilton and Lady Gaga weren't even around then.

ANAHEIM, Paul Voelker: Much ado has been made about whether the president's executive order has violated the due-process rights for Anwar al-Awlaki and one other U.S. citizen, propagandist Samir Khan, who were recently killed in Yemen. For those of us who are now serving, or have served, in the military we know that we (as do all elected officials) take an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Citizens of this nation who chose to leave our country, take up arms against her and openly seek to kill our citizens and destroy the way of life that millions of men and women have laid down their lives to protect since 1775, have no claim on the protections of our Constitution. The U.S. Constitution is not a suicide pact; if you choose to take up arms against your own nation, that is treason and is punishable to the extent the commander in chief determines. This is not my opinion, it is the law of the land. When the South chose to take up arms against the North, did we contest the due-process rights of the Southern soldiers who bore arms against us? No, sadly, we sought them out on the battlefield and killed them. Like all of the rest of us, al-Awlaki is responsible for the choices he makes.

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BUENA PARK, Len Johnson: I won't grieve for Anwar al-Awlaki. He was a terrorist responsible for the death of innocents. He was also an American citizen living in a foreign country. We no longer take prisoners in the “war on terror.” We kill our nation's enemies, at least those with a high profile. This may circumvent the arguments about what to do with them once captured, but it raises an ugly question: Do we believe our president can order assassinations even if the targets are American citizens, and even if we potentially kill innocents in the process? Is this really preferable to housing suspected terrorists at Guantanamo? What if the president decides one of us is an enemy of the state? Can he then order our murder without trial or sentence?

GARDEN GROVE, Bob Callahan: The trial of the UC Irvine students was a lesson in frustration to me. The defense keeps claiming their conviction was comprised of ethnic persecution, religious prejudice and/or was politically motivated. They keep stirring the pot of controversy, but it was none of these things. It is simple and straightforward.

The question that this trial posed is this: If you hire a hall to conduct a meeting, do I have the constitutional right with “freedom of speech” to shout you down so that you cannot hold the meeting in the venue you purchased? That is the whole question. No politics, no race issue or religion. Can you imagine what chaos our world would be in if a speaker could be shouted down without restraint? Every political speech, every town meeting, every city council, every legislative body would be in jeopardy if “freedom of speech” gave radicals the right to shout the speaker down.

The fact that the students interrupted that meeting is not in question. They planned and disrupted the meeting. The judge was lenient in my opinion. He feels they were motivated by their beliefs and did not disrupt for the sake of disrupting.

I could buy into his view if the students pleaded guilty and took the consequences. (The student who plead guilty received 40 hours community service). I'll accept the judge's decision on that case, but I believe the rest of the students pleaded innocent to these charges just to see how much havoc they could cause to those daring to stifle their protest. They did a great job of creating havoc with this frivolous case, by tying up a Superior Court for most of September.

COSTA MESA, Jim Golding: In response to letter-writer Mohamed Elmallah, [“Answering reader questions about Islam,” Commentary, Sept. 25], I think the majority of us realize that Muslims around the world are very decent and peace-loving people. We hear this constantly; so much, in fact, that many think that it's a pivotal point when discussing terrorism. It's not really. In China, most of the populous were peace-loving when the government murdered 70 million. The Germans weren't evil people, yet Hitler manipulated them into either complicity or direct involvement in mass genocide. Most of the Quran is not problematic, but the devil is in the details.

Here are three among about a dozen or more similar quotes out of its pages that cannot be dismissed by looking at “context” as Elmallah might want us to believe.

Quran 8:59: “The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah's enemy.”

MISSION VIEJO, Burl Estes: Where Ms. Ameena Mirza Qazi goes wrong in her argument is when she wrote "these Irvine 11 young men are Muslim, exercising their rights to critique inhumane Israeli policies in a growing anti-Muslim environment." If self-defense is considered "inhumane," Ms. Qazi has a lot to learn about democracy.

If the Palestinians would stop firing thousands of rockets into Israel, sending suicide bombers and denying its right to exist, my guess is that the alleged "inhumane policies" would cease.

As far as free speech is concerned, perhaps Ms. Qazi would be interested in visiting Iran and denouncing their government in public. Or even driving a car there or in Cairo where, according to a report, a woman was sentenced to 11 lashes for committing that offense.

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